The Great Nominating Show Is Nearly Over

On Sunday evening the Republicans held the 10,000-infinity'th of their scheduled 56,675-quintuple-infinity debates, in which everybody picked on Willard Romney and Ron Paul, and in which Rick Santorum was still pretty much a dick, but he was a dick to Willard, who would have encouraged dickitude in Francis of Assisi, so there's that. And, of course, Rick Perry said something really stupid. South Carolina really isn't the place where you want to make loose talk about being "at war" with the federal government. Honestly, Governor Goodhair, why don't you just go down to the harbor, throw a rock at Fort Sumter, and make it official?

And, alas, Jon Huntsman finally succumbed after his long, brave struggle against chronic invisibility. In lieu of flowers, the campaign requests that donations be sent to the Weepy Pundits Clinic, 525 Broder Lane, Centerville, USA. Chris, dude, there one big "What If..." missing from your litany there: What If The Republican Party Wasn't Completely Insane? That really is the only one that matters.

And N. Leroy Gingrich finally let 'er rip, this time at poor Juan Williams. I harbor no sympathy for Williams, who's spent the last two years pretending to be the innocent victim of those jackbooted thugs at NPR — from which, full disclosure, I draw the occasional paycheck — while cashing checks for Fox and writing self-indulgent books that few people read and even fewer people believed. So, when Williams suddenly turned into the Defender of Black People in the debate, everything he'd done in the previous couple of years laboring in the snake-infested vineyards of Roger Ailes should have prepared him for the moment when Gingrich decided to throw 40 years of politically profitable conservative white backlash back in his teeth. For this, the very white Gingrich got a standing ovation from the very white audience for yelling at the very non-white Williams, and if you think the ovation was for Gingrich's stalwart advocacy of the I-73 project, you haven't been paying attention since 1865.

So, other than the final winking-out of Jon Huntsman, not much changed in the few days I was away from the blog. Willard is cruising now, and you can feel the rest of the party starting to coalesce behind him. (Forget that gathering of Bible-bangers down in Texas who "announced their support for" — but did not "endorse" — Santorum over the weekend. If they're not a walking example of a spent force, I don't know who is. This is proof positive that, without a secular gauleiter like Lee Atwater or a Karl Rove to marshal their bigotry, these people are pretty awful at organizing themselves politically.) Further, you can feel the national media beginning to come to grips with his inevitability; the best evidence of this is the sudden spate of stories taking a "more nuanced" look at Willard's career in predatory capitalism, as well as stories attempting to make the one-percent crowd out to be more like the rest of us. This is because most of your major news outlets are owned by corporations that behave like corporations. This is also because the "rules" of political journalism are such that pointing out what should be recognized as the sheer public absurdity of nominating someone who got even wealthier operating in the very economic milieu that nearly shattered the world economy, and which still might, if we're not all very, very careful. Honest to god, on its face, this is every bit as preposterous as nominating someone named Albert Speer for Congress would have been in 1946.

Which is also why all the deep thinking being done about the effect of the "attacks" on Romney's record at Bain Capital is a transcendent waste of time. Everybody knows it is, including the people making the "attacks" in the first place. Were they to somehow get elected, Gingrich, or Santorum, or the comedy genius that is Rick Perry would not do a single damned thing to rein in the business practices they've spent the past eight weeks deploring on the stump. (Where were they, a citizen might ask, when the actual thieving was going on?) They're all committed to rolling back even tepid regulation placed on the financial-services industry by the Obama Administration. People are not enthusiastic about the Republican nominating process because the show has gone on too long, all the clowns have pretty much left the stage, and it's grinding toward its inevitable Willardized conclusion on the basis of an "issue" that everybody knows is as big a fake as the eventual nominee. Watch this Thursday's debate. This will be the one where the other candidates all try to walk back all the mean stuff they said about Willard over the weekend. Dreary is as dreary does.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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